Essays on topics economics: monopolists, oligopolists, and oligarchs aren't better decision-makers for the society just because they's rich and they ain't the gummint.

Anarchy Favors the Rich

He's a fucking moron.-- Rex Tillerson/2017 (guess who he is?)

Today, states containing just 17 percent of the American population, a historic low, can theoretically elect a Senate majority-- Emily Badger/2016

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. -- Victor Hugo/1845

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.-- Marriner Eccles

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.-- Neil deGrasse Tyson/2015 (possibly earlier)

For the median household in the U.S., a top corporate marginal rate cut from 35 to 20 percent would boost wage growth almost four-fold -- from the current 0.6 percent per year to as much as 2 percent, providing up to $7000 of additional income.-- Kevin Hassett/2017Hassett's argument is that if we stop artificial 'profit shifting' (corporations reporting that their profits were earned in low-tax countries, when they were really earned in the U.S.), then somehow they'll magically decide to raise wages for U.S. workers. It makes no sense.-- Seth Hanlon/2017

03 December 2014

A Rock and a Hard Place

From the first time I recall seeing him, I've been convinced of Chris Rock's cerebral approach to comedy. Yes, he is foul mouthed, but the fundamental ideas are sound. He is of course, a high school drop out. Stay in school kids.

So, it comes as no surprise that he and I have/had a similar take on the 2008 election: force the Right Wingnuts to wear the albatross. I was pretty convinced that I should vote for McCain, since there would be no way for the Right Wingnuts to avoid the albatross with the McNugget in the White House and Palin pandering to the guns and God folks. It would be a painful time, but the Right Wingnuts would be toast. Likely for more than a generation.

Didn't happen.

What happened next was predicted: the Right Wingnuts out maneuvered the Obambi into a Trickle Down Recovery, thus getting nearly all the moolah, and the 99% a crumb here and there. Obambi, and the DNC, did the dirty work of the Right Wingnuts, who get to point at Obambi and say, "where's the jobs??"